Keith Haring at Fenimore Art Museum

Installation view of Keith Haring: Radiant Vision at the Fenimore Art Museum

photo provided

Keith Haring was born in 1958 (one month before me) and became a defining artist of his generation before he died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 31. Keith Haring: Radiant Vision, on view at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown through Sept. 6 Oct. 11, tells the story of how that remarkable career happened, and explores what it meant. The exhibition uses a clever graphic timeline, wall text, and ample quotes from the artist to recount Haring's history, and features a broad and deep sampling of the artist's work (including more than 100 works from a private collection, and a very impressive gigantic etching from the Fenimore's collection).

A news release about the show states that Haring "was arguably the most accomplished and prominent American artist of the 1980s," a claim I can neither fully agree with nor effectively refute. As an exact contemporary of Haring's, I can only say that he never held a lot of interest for me, partly because of the very commercial nature of his work, and partly because, though incredibly successful, he didn't have the chance to reach his full potential as an artist.

Radiant Vision offers an excellent opportunity to see for yourself what you think about a young man whose contributions included helping to bring graffiti art and hip hop into the mainstream, extending the art-for-all populism of his good friend Andy Warhol, and combining art with activism, perhaps more successfully than anyone else, before or since. The latter two achievements are, to me, the more valuable, but all of it is astonishingly impressive for a person whose career lasted just 10 years.

Keith Haring is seen at an early exhibition
of his work at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York

photo by Allen Tannenbaum 1982

Haring was essentially a graphic designer whose pictures relied on super-simplified line drawings of iconic symbols to communicate primal messages, just as corporate logo designers strive to do. And he was incredibly good at it. He used pure primary and secondary colors, vivid unmixed paints and inks, big shapes, and empty backgrounds, along with words and symbols, to make exuberant, bold statements about life as he saw it.

As seen in this exhibition, Haring invented his own visual vocabulary - a crawling baby, angular barking dogs, leaping stick figures, etc. - and rode it to vast global dissemination. He also used these skills in eminently worthy campaigns against AIDS, apartheid, and drug abuse, work that is well documented here, and which shows how effective simple graphic art and youthful sincerity can be. 

However, there are a few outliers scattered here and there throughout the exhibition that hint at a much more subtle artist who may have been trying to emerge from behind the public Keith Haring. That artist worked looser, with less clearly defined boundaries, used thinner lines and more shading, and employed a less bright palette to evoke deeper meanings and messier emotions. Some of those works reminded me of Miro' and Picasso and, as I walked around the exhibition, I found that I liked that version of Keith Haring a lot better than the one we all already knew.

One of the best aspects of Radiant Vision is the way it demonstrates Haring's humility and humanity, through quotes on the wall, in which he repeatedly explains how much he wants art to be accessible to all, and through a charming TV show interview in which he asserts an almost selfless modesty, alongside a crystal clear vision. These were the things in the show that did the most to convince me of Haring's significance. Though it goes without saying, it's a terrible shame that he died so young. Despite his own almost superhuman optimism, I simply couldn't shake the sadness.

Checkerboard, polychrome assemblage 2020
by Laurene Krasny Brown

Also currently on view at the Fenimore are a pair of shows that opened a couple of weeks ago and will remain there through Dec 31. Toying with the World: Works by Laurene Krasny Brown and 

Believe In Yourself: What We Learned From Arthur, which features the work of illustrator Marc Brown, stand alone in separate galleries but are closely linked, in that the two artists are a married couple.

Marc Brown is known to anybody with kids through the Arthur books and TV series, and the exhibition does a fine job of sharing the process involved in creating those products. Brown is an absolutely first-rate illustrator and, like any successful commercial artist, he clearly works his tail off. It was great fun to see the thumbnail sketches and story boards that lead to a finished book, but even better to see the exquisitely detailed paintings that are so easily taken for granted once they're on the printed page.

Laurene Krasny Brown is a much more interior artist, working with modest materials to pursue an almost mystical personal vision built around the concept of games. Where I was expecting stuff more childlike, instead I found a persistent exploration of geometric and architectural themes, characterized by a soft palette of early-American colors in paper and gouache. Brown's playfulness was apparent, but tempered by the same seriousness that I've observed in certain active toddlers.

Both shows are well worth spending some time with. By the way, admission to the Fenimore is free for those 19 and under for the duration of these exhibitions - so feel free to bring the kids.

A painting by Marc Brown from Wild About Books

Spotlight on Abraham Ferraro and Hudson Valley Seed Packs at ACCR

Abraham Ferraro has redefined "mail art" with his sculptural installations

For a fun and very colorful experience, check out the solo retrospective of sculptor Abraham Ferraro and the annual show of Hudson Valley Seed packs at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy through Sunday, April 24.

Ferraro began making mailable sculptures out of corrugated cardboard in 2008, when he sent a roughly cubical piece about the size of a lunchbox to himself. This act may or may not have been unique or groundbreaking - but it was not in the well-known tradition of "mail art," wherein the art goes inside an envelope or on a postcard, and it started something big and creative for Ferraro.

Since that start, Ferraro has built up an ever-growing body of work constructed out of geometrically shaped and increasingly colorful modules, all of which were shipped intact from the post office to galleries, where they are assembled like a whacked-out erector set. The exhibition Every Which Way, which fills the Arts Center's main gallery, adds new units and re-creates years' worth of past projects that retain their original shipping labels (including that very first one).

It's a joyous romp through Ferraro's inventively restless oeuvre - carnivalesque, yet formalist. The show also includes a couple of the artist's electrical inventions and some flatter art that has also been shipped, in which bright postal labels combine with printed images to make a picture.

Also on view, in the Wallace + Foyer Galleries, is the Art of the Heirloom exhibition of original art that was commissioned for seed packs sold by the Hudson Valley Seed Library and makes an annual touring exhibition (co-sponsored by Capital Roots). The art is very diverse, yet consistently excellent and beautiful, while the seed packs are extraordinary examples of highly aesthetic graphic design. Seen together, they get you thinking about the ways images are transformed by context.

The show was such a pleasure, it inspired us to pick up a pack of striped cherry tomato seeds for our garden (from the Honest Weight Food Co-op), an unusual result of a Sunday afternoon art excursion.

Rainbow Chard, oil on canvas by Sheryl Humphrey, from Art of the Heirloom

Lit at Albany International Airport Gallery

Scott Nelson Foster, Real and Imaginary Houses 12 - oil on panel

The sky was performing spectacularly at the end of a stormy day, which provided the ideal preparation for Lit, a theme show about phenomena of light at Albany International Airport Gallery that runs through Sept. 13. As with all the shows presented at this generous venue, Lit is intelligent and friendly, and features outstanding artists from the greater Capital Region as both a showcase of regional talent and an oasis of uplifting culture for weary travelers.

But you don't have to be traveling to enjoy these exhibitions - the gallery area is open to the public, parking is free for the first half-hour, and the hours (7 am to 11 pm daily) make it the most accessible high-quality art space anywhere. I was drawn to this show particularly by the inclusion of a few of my favorite artists from around these parts, but also by the theme. After all, without light, we wouldn't exist.

Lit features six artists and a collaborative: a spare number, yet enough to cover a lot of bases here, including sculpture, industrial design, two extremely different approaches to photography, drawing, painting, and projection. The work in the show is approximately evenly divided between color and monochrome, with most of the color coming from the palettes of sculptor Victoria Palermo and painter Scott Nelson Foster.

Victoria Palermo, Up and Down

Palermo alone contributes a nearly eclectic collection, including wall-hung combines of paint and colored plastic, totemic towers of rubber, and small architectural constructions that appear to be made out of jelly (actually, they are also rubber). In addition, her site-specific installation of wood, plexi and dichroic film in the staircase leading up to the gallery (shown at right) is both part of this show and an independent, longer-term project. All these works play with transparency and the fleeting effects of changing light and color; they also are exquisitely crafted, clever, and fun.

Foster contributes a number of related painting from his series on real or imagined suburban houses, including a group of six that examine a modest trailer home in different light, almost like a postmodern Monet (as with haystacks and Chartres cathedral). His color sense is as profound as his irony is subtle; he also includes five very small black-and-white watercolors of similar subject matter that are equally adept.

Kenneth Ragsdale
Lewis and Clark Go Car Camping/Arlington, digital print

Other familiar names in this show are Larry Kagan and Kenneth Ragsdale. Kagan shows three wall relief metal sculptures that astonishingly translate tangles of metal into perfectly articulated shadow portraits of iconic political figures (George Washington, Mao, and Che Guevara). Ragsdale features color photographs made from his own meticulously crafted (yet still playfully rough) dioramas of '60s-era campsites, which he ingeniously lights to create cinematic tones. One diorama is included, complete with its nifty tiny lights and color gels in place, with a wall switch you can flip to see the effect.

The revelation of the show is Yael Erel, an RPI architect whose light projections reflected off metal surfaces produce sharp, stunningly organic motifs that rotate hypnotically. Her collaborative, lightexture, which includes Avner Ben Natan and Sharan Elran, has contributed several metal and ceramic lighting fixtures to this exhibition; they are designed to cast sculpted light patterns through manipulable apertures, and may be the first example of industrial designer products to be part of an exhibition here.

In almost direct opposition to the technical approach of Erel and lightexture, yet aesthetically quite similar, Jared Handelsman presents several delicate gelatine-silver photograms, which he makes by exposing light-sensitive paper to ethereal sources such as moonlight and passing headlights. The resulting shadow pictures of natural plants evoke the quiet of a summer night.

Yael Erel, Moon Record, aluminum LED source, aluminum reflector, rotating mechanism, audio recording

Studio Visit: David Arsenault

Center of Attention - Oil on canvas by David Arsenault

His work has been compared to that of Edward Hopper. He was voted "Best Visual Artist" by the readers of Metroland in 2002. And as a past president and Oakroom Artists stalwart for many years, he has shown a lot in Schenectady and just about everywhere else a painter can in the Capital Region. But David Arsenault has moved on - to Rockport, Mass. - and he's not looking back.

Swaying in Time - oil on canvas

I recently caught up with Arsenault in his newly opened gallery in Rockport, a sweet seacoast town on Cape Ann with beautiful harbors, rocky sea walls, inviting cafes, many galleries, and a long history of resident painters. He moved there only last fall, but has already immersed himself in the cultural scene and staked his claim to the town's iconic "Motif #1," a satisfyingly geometric red fishing shack (seen in the painting reproduced above).

Arsenault was pushed to this decision by a helpful interruption to a long career in publishing (he was trained at Sage College of Albany as a graphic designer), and pulled by an equally helpful wife who has often relocated and was ready to do it again. They landed well, renting a nifty wooden house in town and the crisp space that houses the gallery (seen in this photo), where Arsenault has a well-lit painting loft and lots of nice walls to display his finished work, situated a stone's throw from the Motif on a charming, touristy stretch called Bearskin Neck.

Going Topless - oil on canvas

If you've seen his work in the past, you know Arsenault has one chief concern: Light. Unlike many painters who cherish this element, he used to paint night scenes often (an old favorite you may recall features the multicolored glow of the Malta Drive-In), and he also frequently addresses the matter of sunlight as it enters domestic interiors (as did his idol, Hopper). But the current work I saw on this visit is all about the light in the sky, over the water, and on the land of Cape Ann.

Cape Ann Rocks - oil on canvas

This is not a new subject for Arsenault - he spent a lot of time over the last decade or so painting in Cape Cod, where he also often showed - and he began visiting Cape Ann in 2013. But the full-time immersion is new, and the setting of Rockport, as rugged as the name implies and constantly windy, is a prime jumping-off point for this new life. The fact that Arsenault and his wife, Sue, an independent interfaith minister, set off to make their way there just as winter approached (and what a winter it turned out to be!) speaks to the boldness of the act, and goes a long way to explain how quickly these two have been embraced by the local community.

Rock Star - oil on canvas

But, now that the gallery is officially open (as of April 11) and the tourist season has begun, it's time to see if the decision will work financially. So far, Arsenault is off to a good start, having already sold a few originals and several reproductions (he has long marketed his work at several price points to reach a broader market). One concern is that Rockport tends to be popular this time of year with Europeans - but the euro is down sharply against the dollar; another is that surviving as an artist depends an awful lot on luck.

In the meantime, though, Arsenault is in a great spot - he can just keep painting every day until the next sale walks through the door. And, judging from what I saw on this visit, I'd say it's going to work out just fine. To see more of David Arsenault's art, he recommends you go to his gallery's Facebook page (The Art of David Arsenault). Another option is his website. Or you could just jump in the car and go check it out amid the other wonders of Rockport.

Good Harbor Spring - oil on canvas by David Arsenault

Books: A novel, photographs, and poetry

Though it isn't a picture book, Paul Castellani's Sputnik Summer features a great photo by Adirondack photographer Carl Heilman II on the cover, and its author and his wife, Donna, are great modern art enthusiasts who attend a lot of openings, so it caught my attention.

Castellani is a professor by trade, but his academic roots stay pretty well hidden in this coming-of-age novel that takes place in the late '50s in a fading Adirondack resort town where a somewhat typical 17-year-old boy tries to come to terms with the limits of his hick town, the crummy summer resort his abusive dad runs, his own college ambitions, and the need to get laid.

The story is punctuated by news bits and advertising slogans taken straight from the publications of the day, which provides a sort of parallel narrative that suggests political and social commentary without offering it directly. Castellani is an excellent storyteller, and he keeps you interested in the twists and turns of this intelligent but inexperienced young man's rather fateful last summer at home. Put simply: I enjoyed the book and so, probably, will you or the person you decide to give it to.

Another book that recently came into my possession serves double duty as the catalog of the current exhibition at the Photography Center of the Capital District in Troy. Both are titled Structures and feature the work of two photographers: Ian Creitz and Robert Feero.

It is always different to experience a body of photographs in a book as opposed to an exhibition, and this publication offers an opportunity to compare the two experiences, at least until the show comes down on Dec. 15. In this case, the selection is changed, but the real differences between a show and a book are in terms of scale and juxtaposition.

This book uses the page-to-page flow as part of the presentation - not always entirely successfully, but in an engaging way. Creitz is the more traditional of the two photographers, and he works in many formats and styles: color, black and white, panoramic, and straight on. He has a very good technical command of the medium and apparently loves to seek out decrepit buildings to shoot in, bringing back highly detailed and arresting images of his sad subjects.

Creitz sometimes uses heavy-handed digital effects to make his pictures look antique - an unnecessary effort, as the battered places he explores already amply show the effects of time. Feero, a former abstract painter, also applies a certain digital gimmick, in which the image is refracted into four parts to make a kaleidoscopic mandala. But, in Feero's case, he gets away with it because he has a very keen eye for the type of composition that will work well with this technique, resulting in a particular geometric vision all his own.

A few of Feero's pictures use black and white, but he is really a colorist (the painter lives!). His subjects, mainly buildings and bridges, are so transformed by the multiplication as to be nearly unrecognizable, yet they are essential to Feero's approach. The book is very nicely printed, so the pictures hold their power in the reproductions, and it is attractively priced at $15, though for that you do have to put up with a spiral binding. It would make a very nice gift for any art, architecture, or photography enthusiast.

Barry Lobdell and Michael Tucker collaborated to create Pull Over, a collection of poetry and black-and-white photographs that celebrates symbolism, spirituality, and simplicity. Tucker, the poet, worked for decades in special education and describes himself in the book as a "Vietnam War resister who proudly served with the hippies in Boston." His writing is as sincere as expected, and retains some of the hopeful idealism of that era.

Lobdell's photography was already quite familiar to me through exhibitions and a business relationship, but this presentation casts it in a different light, and I find the combination of the two artists' visions to be mutually beneficial. While each stands on its own, the consistent pairing of a short poem and a single picture on every page or spread of the book creates a fine balance and a lovely rhythm.

The book, an oversized paperback, opens out horizontally to provide a 23-inch-wide layout, and many of the photos are bled to three edges to take full advantage of this expanse of space. The images range from domestic moments to landscapes and cityscapes and are nicely reproduced in a full range of black-and-white tones. Each picture accompanies a poem with related subject matter - not illustrating the words so much as augmenting them.

Tucker's poetry is unadorned and direct, but also at times clever. If for no other reason, I can recommend this writer on the strength of his having the courage and humor to rhyme Cheetos with Speedos. He repeatedly targets certain topics, such as the title poem's advice to stop and look and appreciate, not in a cloying way, but in a gently urgent manner that makes it clear he values the Zen approach to life.

Tucker is a searcher - as is Lobdell - and this brings them together quite comfortably. Priced at $19.95, this book is a good value that will make a fine gift. In fact, I'm planning to give it to my mother-in-law for Christmas - but, please, don't tell her! Pull Over is available at The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Market Block Books in downtown Troy and Northshire Books in Saratoga Springs.

The Seagull   by Michael Tucker
The warm blanket of dawn,
Pink and billowing,
Draws back across
The first blue,
The moon a blur
Of white,
Nowhere now can there
Be night,
Against the gentle, sleepy clouds,
A messenger of the moment,
Circles high,
Greeting day and us.

This sentinel of morning stillness
Is too a seagull,
Looking for a spilled French fry,
Parking lot leftovers, garbage.
We live in two states at once.
In divinity, in vulgarity,
Two sides of one moment.
Will we see through ourselves?
Will we look up?
What we see
Will be our destiny.

Michael Bierut: 30 Years/90 Notebooks at Esther Massry Gallery

By Sara Tack

It’s not often that a graphic design show appears in a gallery or a museum and even less often that one shows up in the Capital Region. That’s why it is pretty exciting to see a show of the magnitude of Michael Bierut: 30 Years/90 Notebooks get curated specifically for The College of Saint Rose’s Esther Massry Gallery in Albany.

Bierut, a partner in the renowned design consultancy Pentagram, has had a brilliant career, designing for a host of national and international clients. He is the author of 79 Short Essays on Design and founder of the popular online journal Design Observer. He’s a senior critic at Yale School of Art and frequent guest speaker at design conferences and organizations across the country. His work has won every design award there is to win, including the prestigious American Institute of Graphic Arts medal.

What distinguishes Bierut’s work from much of the design we see on a daily basis is that his pieces use clever, conceptual twists that create messages we have to think twice about. His ability to do this so poignantly is grounded in his knowledge of the subject at hand, his understanding of how to use modernist form to imply meaning, and a natural gift: intuitive wit.

Most of the pieces in the show are posters and most are in black and white. Sometimes the work has (what appears to be) such a simple concept you wonder why you hadn’t thought of it yourself. Yet the beauty comes from just how profound he makes “the simple.”

In one of the few multi-colored works - Obama Fifty State Strategy, 2008, a campaign poster for Barack Obama - every U.S. state’s name is re-presented and strung literally together without word spacing. Separated only by color, we read the play on words starting with Alobama and proceeding alphabetically through Wyobaming.

In the 7th Annual Book Fair to Help the Homeless, Bierut turns a black-and-white image of an open book upside down to create the roof of a house. At the bottom of the poster is a small, out-of-scale, solitary wooden chair. In a poster advertising the play The Well of Water, at the Parallax Theatre (one of many posters for the theatre in the show) we see a stark charcoal line drawing of a woman’s hair and upper torso. The rest of her face is created from stylized photographs. The eyes are hot and cold faucet knobs, her mouth the spout of the faucet where the water emerges. What is he saying about The Well of Water using a faucet metaphor to represent a woman's face? One would have to see the advertised play to find out.

There are quite a few stunning pieces in the show designed for the Architectural League of New York. Usually their purpose is to announce a lecture, or an event series. My favorite is Scale. This 36-by-48-inch horizontal has a solid black circle just under 36 inches in diameter anchored to the left edge of the poster. On the far lower right end of the circle is one word reversed out to white. The typography - all caps, san serif bold letters, not more than 1/4” in height - reads “SCALE.” The sheer literal contrast of scale focuses us on one of the most defining principles in art and architecture. This is extremely powerful.

Light Years, also for the Archi- tectural League, overlaps the letters of these two words laid directly over the other in varying translucencies. Without any literal illustration or photography, the layering of the letters on a solid black background visually suggests distance over time as we read the words “light years.”

Another set of posters for the Yale School of Architecture runs the gamut of Bierut’s thinking. Architecture and Psychoanalysis Symposium is both clever and funny. A modernist, 1960s-style psychiatrist’s couch is turned 90 degrees running vertically up the side of the poster. At a moment’s glance our minds transfer the image of the couch into an architectural structure/building.

Then we realize what we are looking at and can’t help but laugh at being let in on the visual and verbal play. Furthermore, we realize that, although the poster was installed vertically, it could also be presented horizontally (as shown above). It is more difficult to read the detailed text in this orientation, but that text now takes on the role of the architectural reference, suggesting a city skyline.

So what does the title 30 Years/90 Notebooks have to do with the show? There are two cabinets displaying many of Bierut’s black-and-white composition notebooks that he started using in 1982. He has accumulated 92 books in his 30-year career and can’t go anywhere without his most current notebook. They are used for everything from client meeting notes to thoughts on design, miscellaneous ideas, doodles, conceptual sketches, and working out his design process on any given commission. Many of the displayed pages allow viewers to make connections and see the thinking behind the work on the walls of the gallery.

Two-page spread from a Michael Bierut notebook

A commemorative poster was designed for the exhibit by Bierut himself and is available for sale at the gallery, signed or unsigned. Michael Bierut: 30 Years/90 Notebooks is on view through January 22, 2012.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Guest reviewer Sara Tack is principal artist at Smith and Jones and adjunct professor of visual communication & design in the Electronic Media Arts and Communication department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Graphic Design - Get the Message! at AIHA

Most of us have tried to figure out where you draw the line between fine art and commercial art. My own favorite answer to that slippery question is that it is entirely a matter of intent (not, as some would have it, a matter of quality).

This sentiment is mirrored by the opening quote of the wonderful exhibition Graphic Design - Get the Message! at the Albany Institute of History & Art (through June 12), which ponders that and more while making great use of the Institute's permanent collection and other local resources to present a broad swath of commercial design by talented artists over several centuries.

Organized into thematic sections (Foundations, Graphic Design and Commerce, Political and Social Messages, and The Creative Process), Get the Message! sprawls through four galleries and features seemingly countless original examples of printed matter in two and three dimensions, augmented by electronic, digital, and multi-media material - an appropriately dense barrage that captures so much of our overloaded everyday visual experience.

After an introductory room that touches on the range of themes with examples as intriguing and diverse as war propaganda posters and a powder-blue Tiffany box, the show delves into history with a large display of old-fashioned letterpress equipment and 19th-century broadsides that represent the birth of modern graphic style.

This room also holds a distracting installation of photographs and pulp bales illustrating the papermaking process as practiced today by key exhibition sponsor Mohawk Fine Papers. While it is a blessing to a struggling museum (is there any other kind these days?) to have such prominent corporate underwriting, I must say it's a shame to see it come at this sort of price.

The next, largest gallery puts out the really colorful stuff we readily think of as showcasing the classic elements of graphic design - illustration and typography - in the form of bright and clever posters from the past hundred or so years (examples shown at the top of this post, and above at left).

It could be argued that the 20th century, with its political causes, social unrest, and explosion of commercial advertising, was the golden age of graphic design, and this room shows why. Whether selling war bonds, popular entertainment, educational toys, or soap, the artists behind these designs knew how to get our attention and make a lasting impression.

I had the company of an old friend and longtime graphic designer on this visit, and it was a pleasure to watch how he viewed the work in this section - moving in close and often marveling at the fine-art techniques, such as charcoal drawing and oil painting, that were employed in the service of these pitches. He frequently commented with amazement at the elaborate lettering that these pre-computer artists routinely hand-painted - a nearly lost art today.

For me, it was the simplest designs that held up the best. One artist featured prominently throughout the exhibition is Woody Pirtle, an internationally-known designer active in the Hudson Valley, whose politically-charged posters use color, shape, type, and iconic images in effortless concert to illuminate, anger, or amuse (example shown above at right).

Pirtle is among several top creators - all with local connections - featured in the last section of the show (Creative Process). The others are illustrators Dahl Taylor and William Westwood; design firms Vicarious Visions and Spiral Design; and early 20th-century designers Will H. Low and Hajo Christoph. All are of the highest quality in the business and have found significant commercial success - who knew the Capital Region was such a hotbed of creative design?

The Creative Process section has the expected preparatory sketches and such, but it also shows elements of the commercial design world not typically seen outside its own confines - promotional pieces in expensively elaborate detail that design firms use to give clients an idea of what they can do. Here, Spiral Design is the mind-blower, and it's here that I think the line gets crossed back over into fine art - because, in this case, the client is the artist, and the intention is to show the artist's skill. It's some pretty amazing stuff, from all the participants, and an impressive capstone to the show's historical lead-in.

Hajo, as he was known, is also featured in a separate exhibition one floor up from Get the Message! that details his personal journey from Berlin to Castleton, where he forged a career designing witty and sophisticated packaging for many local manufacturers (example shown at the bottom of this post). There are abundant examples of Hajo's extraordinary work in both exhibitions, including delightful personal art in watercolor, oils, gouache, and other media.

By the way - here's the quote that starts the exhibition, from Paul Rand (world-famous designer of iconic logos for firms such as IBM, ABC and UPS):

Design is the method of putting form and content together.
Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition.
Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.

Food for thought, no?

Rating: Highly Recommended

Note: Throughout the run of Graphic Design - Get the Message!, there has been a series of related lectures and events. The next two are coming soon - at 6 p.m. on Friday, May 6 (in conjunction with First Friday), illustrators Dahl Taylor and William Westwood will present; and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 8, Ellen Lupton, the author of Thinking with Type and other design guides, will address the topic How to Do Things with Typography: Introduction to an Art.

Further on, at 2 p.m. on May 22, graphic designer, typographer and calligrapher Paul Shaw will speak and sign his latest book, Helvetica and the New York Subway System; and at 6 p.m. on June 3, Laura Shore will speak on the topic The Truth About Paper.

All the events are free.

Color Moves at RPI's Shelnutt Gallery

I'm glad the exhibition Color Moves at RPI's Shelnutt Gallery continues through the end of March, which is not Black History Month, though it did begin on Feb. 1, which is. Yes, the five artists in the exhibition (Francelise Dawkins, Ayriel Hunt, Femi M. Johnson, George W. Simmons, and Stephen Tyson) are black - but they have a lot more in common, and a lot more to offer viewers, than their racial identity.

Before I get into the specific qualities of the works in the show, allow me to ponder the issue of segregation. The art world is largely liberal, but segregation can exist there as much as anywhere. And it doesn't necessarily have to do with race, nor is it necessarily bad. For example, we regularly segregate artists by medium - showing painters with painters, sculptors with sculptors and so on. There is also a tendency to separate older artists from younger ones, male from female, conceptual from representational, major from minor. These types of divisions often make sense and help the viewer understand the work within its context.

A lot of times, though, I think curators go too far to separate. While women artists were unfortunately ignored through most of history, does it make sense in 2011 to have a show just of women artists? Ethnicity is another tricky zone - we probably wouldn't balk at the idea of a show featuring Asian or Latino artists, and clearly it's considered good politics (especially in February!) to organize a show around the artists' blackness - but what would happen should someone mount an exhibition specifically restricted to the work of gay white men, or American Muslims? I'm just not sure I see the use in all that.

So I'm glad this show of five worthy artists has its month of March. The gallery has a tradition of showing ethnic artists' work, and that's a fine thing to do; it is a fairly non-traditional space upstairs in the Rensselaer Student Union, where the walls are clean and the lighting effective, though it also serves as a meeting room, so access can be limited and the furnishings do get in the way a bit. If you go, the best bet for parking is in the visitor lot next door, where meters can be fed.

This year's edition of Color Moves (it's an ongoing series) weaves common threads and themes among the group: colorful abstraction fairly dominates, collage is the medium of three of the artists, and there is a certain graphism throughout. Two of the artists are using non-rectangular shapes, and the materials are mostly outside of the mainstream (fabric, carbon paper, wood, acetate).

All this makes for a fresh and compatible array of artists who are nonetheless rather divergent in their approaches and (one would assume) intents. The oddest one out would be Hunt, who is a student at RPI whose work fits squarely in the mode of graphic design (one piece is shown at the bottom of this post), and has the clearest messages in it. Her deft, assured drawing style blunts the force of Hunt's confrontational subject matter, which seems to be suburban black youths' need to be more aware of history.

Also somewhat narrative are Johnson's painterly collages, made of torn paper fragments that articulate figures in a very loose way and use color whimsically. I especially like the most recent of his four pieces in the show, titled Night Train (another, titled Village Keeper is shown above at right).

Dawkins' and Tyson's works are intermingled on one wall, nearly competing with each other in terms of vivid color and rounded forms (one of Dawkins', titled Sanctuary/Still Waters is shown at the top of this post; one of Tyson's, titled Tempo, is shown above at left). Dawkins, a fabric collagist, wields a wild pair of scissors to make vibrant compositions that are as complex as they are playful. Two earlier pieces (both circular) are more muted, layered, and soft than the two newer ones, which are more direct. The larger of the two, which is her only rectangular piece in the show, is liberally peppered with images of fruits and birds.

Tyson, a Siena College professor, has a history of making busily patterned abstract paintings. His four pieces in this show, all dated 2009, are brightly painted, shaped planks and slabs of wood with stripes, color-field elements, soft geometry, and metallic gold. Their rhythms show jazz as a clear influence, but two of the titles (Asteck and Eltem) mystify.

Simmons appears to be the most prolific of the group. His 12 collaged drawings in the show include four from earlier periods (1996, 2004 and 2005), two from 2010, and six from 2011, and they remain consistent throughout. Still, though I've known Simmons and his work for 30 years, I am still hard pressed to describe or explain it.

A pair of "self-portraits" (one is shown above at left) are somewhat revealing of the artist's thoughts, while containing elements of the other works. Altogether, they are crudely assembled with bits of Scotch tape, yet elegantly ethereal. Simmons incorporates scraps of his own work in various media to make these pieces, which represent a truly personal vocabulary that only a dedicated and quirky artist could possess.

Rating: Recommended

Vignette at the Arts Center

Also in Troy (through Mar. 20) and not to be missed is a very thoughtfully curated exhibition of five artists at The Arts Center of the Capital Region titled Vignette. Joel Griffith, Ingrid Ludt, GG Roberts, Rebecca Shepard, and Ann Wolf are a rather eclectic bunch who have been brought together by the ex-Metroland critic Nadine Wasserman, who wrote this statement:

For much of art history, narrative art functioned as a way to tell a story or to represent a religious, historical, or allegorical event. With the advent of modernism, however, direct story telling was derided and the narrative form was transformed by abstraction and non-linearity. With postmodernism the narrative remained suspect and artists created multifaceted work that further fractured the notion of “grand” narratives. But artists have never stopped creating narrative work. Even abstract and non-representational art can be narrative and can contain coded references to political, social, and personal issues. This exhibition presents five artists each working with narrative structure but each bringing to it a unique approach. Taken together these artists present a variety of styles encompassing abstraction, surrealism, seriality, realism, and fiction.

In quick capsules: Roberts' three paintings in the show are exuberantly kitschy - I wish there were more of them here to see; Ludt offers 18 works, in a group of 10 slightly larger ones and eight slightly smaller ones - they are gestural, intuitional, oddly colored, light; Wolf uses gouache in monochromatic swaths of expert rendering to evoke fairytale landscapes; Shepard's pencil drawings subtly seduce the eye with sad little tales, while paired drawings and patterned-paper collages nearly steal the show; and Griffith's masterfully painted streets are a blend of Maxfield Parrish and Gregory Crewdson - first noticed at the 2010 Mohawk Hudson Regional, he is a force to be reckoned with (the image below is titled Scism Road, Trailer).